[net.micro.amiga] Comparison of Operating Systems

sroth@muddcs.UUCP (Steve Roth) (04/01/86)

     The recent postings of various versions of microemacs have provided
an interesting comparison of operating systems.  One version of microemacs
that we have been working with has code in it for a number of operating
systems including VAX/VMS, UNIX V7, AmigaDos, and MS-DOS.  Below is a com-
parison of the number of lines of C code for certain tasks under each of
those operating systems.

		    Lines of Code:
    Task	    VAX/VMS	UNIX V7	    AmigaDos	MS-DOS
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Spawn CLI	    32		13	    7		5
    Spawn Command   38		14	    10		7
    Prepare Term
	for edit    37		5	    1		0
    Clean up after
	edit	    10		1	    1		0
    Write char	    3		1	    1		1
    Flush output    11		1	    0		0
    Read char, no
	echo	    25		1	    3		1

    Furthermore, we ran termio.c (the terminal i/o routines, which are the
majority of the system-dependent code) through the C preprocessor for each
operating system.  After deleting references to include files in each one,
we found:

    Number of #includes removed:
		    5		1	    0		1
    Number of characters of preprocessor output:
		    7806	3964	    3770	3675

    Based on past experience, these statistics seem quite indicative of
the relative level of difficulty of system-level programming on each of
these operating systems.  We hope you found this information as amusing
as we did.  Have a nice day!

						Steve Roth
						Marc Sugiyama

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Roth		Harvey Mudd College, Claremont California
ucbvax!sdcsvax!scgvaxd!muddcs!sroth     -or-    STEVE@YMIR.BITNET

dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) (04/03/86)

>
>		    Lines of Code:
>    Task	    VAX/VMS	UNIX V7	    AmigaDos	MS-DOS
>    ----------------------------------------------------------
>    Spawn CLI	    32		13	    7		5
>    Spawn Command   38		14	    10		7
>    Prepare Term
>	for edit    37		5	    1		0
>    Clean up after
>	edit	    10		1	    1		0
>    Write char	    3		1	    1		1
>    Flush output    11		1	    0		0
>    Read char, no
>	echo	    25		1	    3		1
>

	You forgot BSD 4.2/4.3 . It's about the same as UNIX V7, except that
I myself can Spawn stuff in one, namely:

	if (!fork()) execv(...) 

	Still, other people may want more control.  Also, the '0' entries
are misleading, considering that the number of things (options) you can do on
a UNIX TTY port is quite a bit larger than what you can do from AmigaDos or
MS-DOS.  E.g. MS-DOS takes 0 lines to do the above because it can't (easily)
do anything BUT the above... unless you've written library routines to do the
nasty stuff.

	(I'm not flaming because this article put VMS in a bad state... I hate
VMS)


				-Matt

gregg@okstate.UUCP (04/11/86)

>  /* ---------- "Comparison of Operating Systems" ---------- */
>  
>       The recent postings of various versions of microemacs have provided
>  an interesting comparison of operating systems.  One version of microemacs
>  that we have been working with has code in it for a number of operating
>  systems including VAX/VMS, UNIX V7, AmigaDos, and MS-DOS.  Below is a com-
>  parison of the number of lines of C code for certain tasks under each of
>  those operating systems.

		.........

>  						Steve Roth
>  						Marc Sugiyama
>  
>  -- 
>  -----------------------------------------------------------------
>  Steve Roth		Harvey Mudd College, Claremont California
>  ucbvax!sdcsvax!scgvaxd!muddcs!sroth     -or-    STEVE@YMIR.BITNET



	Come on guys....  This has absolutly no relevance at ALL.  I can write a
new library for any of the given systems, and make it look like the best
or the worst.  Just because the orginators of each system choose a different
user level interface to the system, doesn't imply that any one is better
than the other DOES IT?????   The point is, you can hide anything you
want from the programmer, making it easier, or more difficult to use any
given feature (or bug for that matter).


Gregg Wonderly
Department of Computing and Information Sciences
Oklahoma State University

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    or
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